


June

by Cog



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: M/M, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-09
Updated: 2016-06-19
Packaged: 2018-07-13 23:47:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7143434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cog/pseuds/Cog
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>PTSD swallows for him what he can’t. It’s a list of murders and victims, a list of memories, a list of lost people; and the heaviness of the world’s end. There never was a rebirth. The PTSD’s been fed since he was a boy. But now maybe it’ll just eat him, too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Catcher in the Rye

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! This is the first of a six-part story I'll be publishing in the weeks leading up to Comic Con San Diego (to kill time before the season 7 trailer, ya know?)! I haven't really written a fic in a little over a year, so I'm really sorry if this chapter isn't very strong. Special thanks to my friend, Chris (president-frankenstein.tumblr.com) for beta reading! Updates will be on Thursdays! Sorry in advanced for the angst. Enjoy!

The bad taxidermy of that ghoulish boar head has been there for as long as he can remember, up on the wood paneled wall next to the kitchen door, perpetually growling at his family. While taxidermy is generally creepy, being that it’s a prerequisite trait of any dead thing that gets decoratively stuffed; this particular one is remarkably unsettling. The fur from the neck curves onto the wall and rests as though growing out of the wood, a belief that would have been spread around the neighborhood by local children had they had the opportunity to enter the Dixon household. The creature has thin doll-like hair, rough when you rub the underside of your hand up it. It whitens around the top of the snout, kissed the curled nose with its flaring nostrils (inside of which, if one were to look, are a number of unpleasant zit-like bumps). The boar has its mouth open as if it were lunging forward to bite whoever has the misfortune of being audience. The tongue is narrow and pinkly wrinkled the softest image asides the sharp yellow fangs with the muster to cut your finger if caressing the tip. Small black beads represent the eyes, with curled brow and fur giving off the appearance of rage. It was this rage that deterred visitors.

Merle had once told him that, before he was born, there was another Dixon child. She’d been a real wuss, refusing to enter the living room for fear of that piece of shit adorning the wall. One day their father had become frustrated by these nervous antics and had forced her to address the boar face-to-face. Her little doe eyes met the inside of its mouth, with the keen fear of this monstrosity. It then awoke and swallowed her whole, in front of Merle and his father.

When Daryl asked his mother for confirmation in regards to the authenticity of this tale, she’d just shrug him off. Eventually, in adulthood, Merle confessed it had been fabricated; but not without mocking his naivety first.

The July rain’s forte is amplified by the metal shingles of his modular home in the early morning- that period of night during which nothing feels quite how it does in the verity of the daylight. Behind him, his mother is chain-smoking her second pack for the night and leisurely flipping through the pages of an old National Enquirer on the démodé plaid sofa. The lamp beside her flickers and she’ll occasionally shake it steady with a cuss. Daryl fidgets with the knots Merle had tied in the shag carpeting as he studies the ghoulish taxidermy for the thousandth time. A puff of smoke escapes the woman before she disturbs her son’s trance with a quiet little “Boo”.

The only facet of his shock that betrays him is the slight jump in his shoulders, but this interruption is enough to encourage the young boy to refocus his attention to the television set and the dimly-colored figures that reside within the biblical film currently airing.

Mr. Dixon is out for the moment, searching for Merle with his buddies after the adolescent had fled disciplinary action following a knife-fight that morning. Daryl had been too giddy to fall asleep and decided to stay awake with his mother until his brother returned. For the past few hours, he’d managed to stray away from lingering fears pertaining to this matter through the film, which hadn’t been entirely fascinating for a child but the violence was enough to entrance him for around three hours. In all honesty, he’d only started to get into it because he misread the title of “Ben-Hur” as “Been-Whore”.

Daryl isn’t sure what he’d missed in his daze of the boar, but Charlton Heston is looking frantic now as he shuffles through a crowd of sheet-dressed Roman citizens. The perspective changes then to a man lying on a grey platform, the blood dotting his chest matching the red robes of the soldiers that slam a mallet down on his crimson-painted feet, and Daryl can’t help but be fascinated by the moderate nudity and gore. Men hoist the platform up with thick wooden ropes and reveal the nature of the situation: a crucifixion. Christ rises in his tortured state before a herd of horrified onlookers.

Headlights shine into the window, illuminating the room in the stripes of the aluminum blinds. Mrs. Dixon puts out her cigarette in the arm of the sofa and stretches as she rises from her seat. Daryl watches women in the film screech in grief as Christ has risen fully, head limp and arms out with the cast of dawn illuminating him from behind. He’s too young to understand whether it’s hilarious or tragic.

And then it’s early October and Daryl sits in one of those old antique school desks.

This one’s painted rusty blue, with uncomfortable orange wood on the actual seat and writing surface, which are both littered with pencil carvings of names and hearts and swears. The deepest and blackest ingrained in the pine wood reads “MERLE”, and therefore the reputation in Sunday school left by his brother was enough to isolate him in the corner to share the same violated workspace as had been vandalized by the older Dixon. Merle had faced expulsion the year prior to absolutely no one’s surprise and the last impression made on the kind volunteer teacher was that she’d be able to tame his brother in his wake. The alienation and rulers were part of this process, and Daryl seemed to constantly be the victim of circumstance.

In the front of the small chapel classroom stands a young brunette girl wearing a button-front frilly cardigan and brown buckle shoes. Her lithe little hands are clasped together against her chest as she recites her verses in a proud and shrill voice. Only one of the ceiling fans is running but the lights flicker on both, adding to the eerie discomfort of the classroom experience. He’d tried to focus on the outdoors in anticipation of the later afternoon, maybe to watch the trees sway and find god in the sunshine, but they were murky with dirt which resulted in unclear visage. Instead, his attention turns to a fly buzzing around the classroom in confusion. He wants to kill it. 

“About three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, ‘Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?’ ” She recites, eyes focused on infinity. The fly lands on Daryl’s desk, right in the curve of MERLE’s L. In the background, the fan hums softly and the clock ticks consistently. Daryl levels his head to the desk and reaches his pencil towards the insect as he examines the slowing of its wings as it settles, big reflective eyes seeing the world in a million different ways to him.

“When some of those standing there heard this, they said, ‘He’s calling Elijah.’” The quotation continues as he carefully wedges the lead towards the diptera in anticipation to poke it.

“Mr. Dixon!” the teacher- what was her name? Miss Mary?- scolds. He drops the pencil and straightens in his seat, resigned to the indignation of the insect fleeing from his desk and returning to its perilous flight of discombobulation.

“Im-immediately one of them ran and got a sponge. He filled it with wine vinegar, put it on a- uh- staff, and offered it to Jesus to drink,” The girl clamors, knees shaking now as she desperately tries to regain the words so thoroughly ingrained in her mind by the course. “The rest said, ‘Now leave him alone. Let’s see if Elijah comes to save him.’”

Daryl is once again entranced by the fly. It isn’t to say that this was an intentional distraction from the tedium of Sunday school, but the loud ticking of the clock became more distance with every curve of the insect’s flight. Once more, the fly whizzes past him, but this time he makes no effort to catch it. A few of the other students begin to share his interest in the show of the bug, but it was short-lived.

The fly finds the light of the halogen bulb- the one thats fan is off. They kiss for a moment and the insect falls to some nondescript location on the dry wooden floor. The momentary spectators relay their attention to the petit and very much nervous presenter but part of Daryl feels cheated. He’d taken a liking to such an insignificant accessory of the early autumn classroom life, in a sense, because it had removed him from the distraught of the dull moment. It was little distractions that had to captivate him being that there wasn’t much else, but the naïve boyishness of the setting would appear admirable by any stretch of a corrupt adulthood.

“Daryl!” Miss Mary snaps with an agitated assault on his aloof temperament, “Do you know what happened next?”

A dozen different pairs of eyes glance at him, hues varying but all reflecting a certain incriminating curiosity. His words catch in his throat and he maintains his downcast reverie in hopes of maintaining his pride. But it isn’t easy to block out the glare of an authoritative figure in childhood’s stature and he understands that there’s no salvation in silence this time.

“No?” She threatens.

“God ‘idn’t save ‘im.”

“No, Daryl. God saves all.”

The middle-aged Vietnamese woman kneeling before him, hands clasped around a Rosary as she vehemently begs the lord’s forgiveness, appears to be in agreement with this statement. It’s been many years but Daryl can’t remove himself from these memories as he stands there, in the middle of a long-abandoned gas station minimart, gun pointed down to a woman in prayer.

This convenience store was relatively new in the days before and therefore hadn’t been marked as a notable location on any of the maps they’d been using in recent months. It was situated more a bit more West-bound than they were frequent to venture, but this wasn’t what had really attracted Daryl in making the decision to enter; rather it was the screeches rattling from within. The door is spray painted with a large red X and newspapers lay scattered among discarded food wrappers and lottery tickets on the linoleum floor. The same eerie light of Sunday school infiltrates through filthy windows, but there also lays semblance in the distance buzzing and blurred motions of flies. 

Next to the form bowed beneath him lies the twice-deceased corpse of a younger Vietnamese man. The last outfit he’d decided to wear on the day that he met his unfortunate fate included a navy blue Polo, jeans that appeared to fit a bit off, and worn-soled hiking boots. His clouded irises stare into the oblivion of purgatory, divided by a beautiful bloody lobotomy right of his bridge, given by a hunting knife. It trickles down the side of his face, turning smoke to red, and builds a gory pillow-puddle under the man’s head. His dirty fingernails hold the flesh of another beneath them and every minor gap in his teeth entraps vicarious skin, contrasting the greyness of his rotten and reanimated self.

The gash is located at the prime muscular point between the neck and the collar bone. Jagged skin curls up against teeth marks and fluid flows heavily, intermingling salty tears with salty blood. Her chapped lips are loudly reciting Psalm 23 against her labored breathes, shaking form surrendering to the finality that lingers in the rips of her skin.

Daryl watches her through nervous eyes and reflecting her tremors in his own hands. He feels the bumps and the peaks of his arms as the grief sets in, grunting before reclaiming his stoic stature. It would be tragic to admit the softness that had blanketed his abused heart, as if years of belts were lost in an instant of affection, but it would be a greater misprint to deny the empathy he had for this stranger.

His eyes dart back and forth from her knit brow to her dangling cross, shaking with each desperate word. It’s one of those highly-detailed fake-gold ones that are often pawned in the south, intricately carved with a little dead Christ on it. Daryl knew someone who would get a kick out of it.

The ambiance is so still; as it often is in very severe instances such as this one. Part of the man craves violence to occupy his seeping adrenaline, falling from his fingertips each time he has to adjust his grip on his gun. He decides to break the moment and nods down at the woman. “Hey,” he grunts softly at her.

Black-pupils reveal themselves instantly as the prayers subsist. The bite is bleeding a bit more now but with more consistency in its flow, and her pain is quite apparent in every bit of her stature and visage. Daryl can’t comprehend the sadness she tries to communicate through those eyes; yes, he understands the dying longevity of her existence, but not the other complications of her beliefs. Tears dry on her cheeks and her raspy breaths fill the space as she separates her cracked lips to speak:

“Kill me.”

“I don’t wanna.”

“Kill me,” she insists.

And he begrudgingly pulls the trigger.

Going outside lifts the curtain of the moment from the man. The tragedy of two corpses has been left behind, alongside a funny little crucifix, and the unbearable heaviness of a drab space. The sunlight, though bright enough to make him squint and shield his eyes momentarily, feels like a baptism in recounting the events of the past several minutes.

The physicality of the outdoors always resonated with Daryl somewhere in his damaged being. This could potentially tie back to his affiliation with the indoors as an enclosure of his nuclear family; it was inside his childhood house that he received the scars on his back as well as much of the other trauma he’d endured.

Being outside was also a primitive trait of mankind, and therefore the freedom from not only his definition of mundane but also the expectations of deeper intuition allows him to thrive away from walls.

Rick approaches, trekking along the gravel with audibly crunching steps, one hand on his holster and the other mimicking Daryl’s in shielding his eyes.

“Heard a gunshot. Everything went a’right in there?” The ex-sheriff asks casually. 

On outings such as this one, the mood is generally light- even in somewhat serious situations. Rick enjoys making runs with Daryl because it removes his responsibility from the situation, being that Daryl carries his guilt for him. With others, it’s a continuous effort to ensure the safety of the group. But when it’s just him and Daryl, if someone goes down, then that’s on the hunter’s conscious.

Today holds a particularly ambivalent atmosphere between the pair. The nature of their mission isn’t extraordinarily strenuous or urgent, as well as both men finding themselves to be happily situated in their current lives. It’s a good day overall, even reflected in the weather as some sort of pathetic fallacy.

“Ye, just some walkers.”

It isn’t difficult to recognize this as a lie, especially with the shrieks that had hailed them there, but Rick knows not to push it. He decides to change the topic before the mood starts to droop.

“Most of tha’ gas was dried up, but they had a barrel with some 92 out in the back that should do us some good.” 

The reception to this claim is a pleasant grunt and they begin to stroll back to the black sedan they have parked on the farther lane from the gas station, orange fuel tank perched on the hood as promised.

“You excited fer today?” Rick asks, scooping the tank by its handle and swinging it a little, creating a fulfilling swoosh, as he turned to the trunk and popped it inside. The trunk is then slammed shut, rattling the automobile, and no longer the focal point of the interaction.

Daryl watches as his peer completes this action, arms crossed and face neutral. Rick looks up and smiles at him knowingly. Their eyes meet for a moment, and it’s a shock to think of every sort of stillness being prolonged in the most climactic moments of the apocalypse. Even the dull was supposed to be vivid and the mundane nomadic. It’d be a shock to find that the end of the world was rather still, but there seemed to be some natural humanity in living on an earth inhabited by the dead somehow.

The staring contest deems Daryl a loser, as he breaks the glance to chuckle in the quiet satisfaction that consumes his mood for the time being.

“Yah,” he confesses, and they enter the car.

Rick smirks while he starts the engine, satisfied with the honesty of the hunter. Another moment of silence follows the roars of the automotive awakening, during which Daryl pensively glances at the gas station through the window. The ex-sheriff understands the other man’s body language well enough by now to know that he is trying to conceal his expression under the guise of deep thought, but decides to continue on this topic in a sort of building comradery. 

Once they’re in motion, he proceeds, “You ain’t seen one another in- what—a week?”

“Nah, it’s been a lil longer,” Daryl shyly corrects, beginning to bite at his thumb nail, “He wasn’t ‘ere last time. Missed him bi’ a day,” he concludes with a nonchalant wave of hand. Rick keeps his eyes on the rode but the older man can feel his ambivalent mood wash over the armrest and clog the air in a sort of humorous-judgmental way. “What?”

“Nothin’,” Rick responds, shaking his head a bit.

The hunter grunts and returns his eyes to the passenger window as he tries to calm his buzzing brain. Infatuation has consumed him and spit out nothing more than the muscles to maintain a mildly casual visage, but his heart slaps his ribcage like a tennis ball on concrete and the butterflies in his stomach dance their way into his lungs, taking his breath away. 

Daryl Dixon has very blue brain, the color of the sea before a rainstorm or the sky as it approaches sunset. A piercing sort of blue, with licks and scars and kisses of frost green- and it’s clear in his mind even in the fog of exasperation that everything ever wrong is resting now. He feels himself drowning in the blurs of brown and grey that had once felt like home, pulling the sky down to him to cradle the remnants of solitudes years.

But simultaneously it’s none of that. The sensation he feels is natural longing, and contempt, and excitement, and the fear that binds every human belief together. It’s the moment that you let the arrow fly and know it’ll kill the deer; the moment before you stab the last walker in a herd and know that you’ve made it out safe. It’s every ounce of anticipation and exhilaration that one can hold in their gut, bleeding into his brain.

Rick coughs awkwardly before popping an obscure 60s Jazz disc into the player, a sort of default sound for when he left his choice country CDs back at the safe zone. A crisp transatlantic accent begins a hymn about a womanizer and the quiet that had been infected with unspoken joy is devoured by the white noise.

Daryl’s thoughts fall back more earthly as he catches site of movement on the road. He turns back to Rick and holds his index up, encouraging him to slow down a bit. The growing dot on the heat-blurred horizon grows more lucid in view with each passing instant. Humid air floods the car with the cranking of a window down and Daryl pushes through, resting his arm on the exterior of the door and his head peering out like a dog. He invests the figure with thorough gaze.

It’s a walker, groaning and swaying as is the nature of its being, Grey features delve into dark fabrics and an identity lost in death. Arms are lazily extended, reaching for the words of the song as the audio entices is. It bites and chews on nothing with the same sort of longing Daryl himself feels. There’s an odd bit of familiarity or nostalgia in its form, but it is excused by the déjà vu of every lost face in the death of a civilization.

“Looks kinda like Kal, right?”

“Nah, it doesn’t look at all. Damn thing’s got its eyes cut out.”

The corpse lunges for the car haphazardly and the hunter duck backs inside, ignoring the concern Rick had instilled in him with that comment. He closes the window before crossing his arms once more. The image of the creature lingers in the side view mirror.

Daryl wants to kill it now. 

But then they speed up and it loses relevance to him.

The hunter begins to fidget with the knife on his holster and Rick turns down the music to revive their conversation, “I’d be lyin’ if I said I didn’t miss Hilltop- never thought I’d have bacon again after the prison.”

“Miss it too,” mumbled the other man. He removes a cigarette from his pocket and lights it up, cracking down the window once more so that he may puff out the smoke. 

Blue gradates to white in the sunshine of the noon hour. It’s the type of day that schoolchildren daydream about in the coldest moments of December. Every leaf of every tree is painted a bright and vivacious green, and even the fallen ones that blanket the forest floor seem to be illuminated in the bright warmth that envelopes northern Virginia at this point in the year. Each mile closer to the Hilltop Colony becomes brighter and brighter until they reach an endless expanse of wheat. This field, familiar to them, stretches on for acres and acres.

“I was thinkin’, since we’re just stoppin’ by today and comin’ back next week with supplies, why don’t you stay at Hilltop? Just for the week.” There’s a nervous edge to Rick’s tone and he sighs, “I know you been wantin’ some time with him and, I mean, there’s not much goin’ on right now.”

Daryl spits the fire of his lungs out the window and takes another drag.

“’ll think about it.”

The ex-sheriff nods and turns the volume of the record up again. In the meantime, Daryl gazes over the field. 

Looking over tan fields such as these always invoked some sort of nostalgia in the man, or maybe he’s just sentimental today. The car feels still, like the road is moving by its own will as the patterns of crops loop away from him. Rick still steers but there’s some sort of caricaturist aspect to the round repetition of a steady car, as if they’re two children playing pretend.

An infinity of dry wheat is interrupted. “Ay, hold up!” Daryl instructs.

He doesn’t understand why he’s prolonging this trip, but there’s even more familiarity in the figure that breaks the pattern. The hunter squints as the car begins to slow, trying to make sense of the vague geometric form in the distance.

“What is it?”

“’Ere’s something in the field.”

Everything halts to a stop when Rick’s rough leather boot pushes into the brake. The ex-sheriff leans forward in his seat and turns to find the subject of Daryl’s interest. A moment of investigation in the still car makes the form more apparent.

“’t’s a cross,” Rick declares.

For the first time since that night many years ago, the hunter remembers the film he’d seen. Coincidentally, it had been a precursor to the viewing of Merle’s worst beating. Memories of Ben-Hur and the red of the Romans wash over him, in waves that move like the swaying of the rising cross. Each grain of wheat that lingers in its afterlife is a mourner and a testament to the visage of a fallen prophet. This setting is different but the scene somehow resonates with the moment.

“Let’s go check it out,” he nods towards the field.

The duo arms themselves, guns out with safety off, preparing for combat if need be. Both doors open in synch and shut in two separate bangs. Rick stalks around the side of the automobile to meet Daryl, and together they head into the wheat together.

It’s the shuffle of grain against denim and the crunch of a dead harvest, it’s the faded oak in the form of a lower case T that stands ominously in the middle of it, and it’s the absolute silence of vocalization from the two men. They’re both swimming in seriousness, but give the appearance of two ants in a bowl of sugar. Wheat crashes around them during this sullen little parade.

There is nothing on the cross.

It becomes clearer and clearer as they approach it that there may be a sort of religious significance to the structure- maybe a recollection of hope in the midst of trauma. The second that he lays eyes on it, Daryl know exactly who he’ll bring here, and the jokes he’d tell. “We found this giant cross in the middle of a wheat field,” he’d say, “if you don’t watch your ass; you might end up on it”. 

Tension that was held between the two men breaks as they lower their weapons, proceeding onward to just examine the structure. It is held upward with a series of tightened ropes, tied to heavy rocks piled together in maybe six locations around the physical crucifix- showing that some sort of sweet planning had gone into putting this thing up. Daryl speculates that it may be a grave.

A bright red “A” had been spray-painted where the planks intersect, further evidence supporting his funerary premonition.

“Jesus Christ. Someone musta really been loved to deserve this.”

There’s no evidence, though, of a tomb having been dug here. The earth around the wood is maybe a bit unsettled with the freshness of the planted cross and Daryl realizes that the “A” is fresh- this landmark had been around for no more than a week. It then occurs to him that the ground is stained with wetness, as well as some surrounding wheat, and that there is something very wrong with this scene. At its center lays the crucifix, bleeding.

Daryl circles around to the backside of the cross curiously, gun raised once more. A groan calls down to him and he looks up.

“Rick,” he says, voice cracking, “yer gonna wanna see this.”

Concern begins to nudge at the other man’s chest as he stalks over to his leather-wearing comrade. Rick’s eyes bounce back at forth between Daryl and the religious gesture.

Up on the cross, groaning and moaning, is a dead man. Down at the base is a pair of hiking boots, neatly side-by-side, with socks and gloves tuck within. The walker writhes to no avail as its hands and feet are nailed to the wood, stains cinematically rolling down the planks its bound to as if there are wounds in its back. It adorns a dirtied pair of khakis, a light blue collar-shirt, and a navy blue quilted vest, as well as accessories consisting of a bandana around the neck and a dark beanie atop its mindless head.

The gruesome figure shakes its head and chomps at the air with an unconsummated rage, filthy in all manners moral. Once-sun kissed skin is now greying and abysses of blue are unblinking. Its beard is trimmed, though, and its hair is clean. Disgust was brought on after a lifetime of beauty. Beauty and decay. This walker epitomizes both of these traits. 

Up on the cross is a dead man. And his name is Paul Rovia.

The inevitability of it had somehow maybe the prospect unimaginable, in the same way you reread your favorite book even if you know the ending. It is the pause before a great fall and simultaneously the proceeding moment on the ground. And it is a thousand knives to the gut and the chest and the spine. Weak knees and breathlessness- just symptoms of the comprehension that this is the most final of finalities. Stillness, again, overtakes a climactic moment.

Daryl would never again hear him read aloud in bed or feel the skin of his forearm brush against his own. Never again would they share a joke or middle of the night secrets or even the same air. Every unspoken word between them, a blink and a glimpse into one another, self-grown thoughts born in two minds- and it wouldn’t happen again. 

What were his last thoughts? 

As he was up there dying, was Daryl in his thoughts? 

Did he cry? Did he scream?

Did Jesus know he was going to die or did he think he’d dodge it again this time like he had every other time in the past?

He’s there but he’s gone. Daryl can see him very clearly, joints tense in stiffened movement, head shaking wildly with an unblinking rainstorm in the door to what had once been a soul. The illness moves his limbs but he’s been long vacated.

There’s no more Paul.

The hunter wishes that he could break down like he had with every other significant loss he’d experienced. He wants to fall to his knees and sob and pray; he wants to scoop up a broken thing and carry it to a casket. But this time, he doesn’t feel a thing other than the weight that Jesus had removed from him crashing against him much heavier than before.

Neutral expression, glazed and reviewing the sight before him, blinking between the gold of the Vietnamese woman’s crucifix and the decay of reality then Rick’s hand crashing down onto his shoulder like a punch; furrowed and upset brow. It’s an orchestra of overwhelming sentiment. It’s pity. Dixons don’t get pity, and Dixons most certainly don’t linger on a thought.

Rick opens his mouth to speak, his lips quivering, but the capacity to produce a sound flees from him. He resettles his hand on the leather-clad shoulder and clears his throat, speaking weakly,

“Daryl, I- I’ll do it.”

It’s fast but the hunter shrugs himself away from the failed attempt at comfort and raises his gun, blank-eyed and weary. The walker gurgles and shakes with head tilted down towards him, the blood of its hands and feet still steadily dripping.

Rick lunges for the gun but it’s too late.

There’s a gunshot.

And now the walker has one more bleeding wound; this one between the eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aw man!! How romantic! Daryl wanted to take him on a date to an ominous giant cross in the middle of a field....... aw man, need me a freak like that!! Amirite??? More cute relationship goals to come in upcoming chapters!!!!


	2. Fahrenheit 451

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Daryl fluctuates between reality and memory in trying to define what home means to him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey! Sorry for the late update; it was finals week so things have been super hectic. I really dedicated a lot of time to this chapter because it was a huge struggle to compose my thoughts appropriately and it had to be re-written like 8million times because I couldn’t figure out which sequence of flashbacks was the most compelling….. etc. I’m sorry for the super tacky narrative cinematics and misused adjectives. This chapter is probably really mediocre honestly, bleh. Since I’m getting out for the summer at the end of next week and exams are mostly over, I hope that the next chapter will be timely. Again, thank you so much to Chris for beta reading! I don’t know how I’d be able to publish this stuff without you, dude. Enjoy!

Black asphalt is usually black at night.

An indisputable fact, redundant even. But black asphalt ought to be black. Especially at night.

And while it is black during the day, there tends to be a greyish hue that allows for shadows to define themselves from the graining of a steady ground. At night, though, it’s an abyss– darker than the sky in December or a dilated pupil in sunlight. It is a black that does not induce horror, but rather neutrality.

You’re not supposed to see shadows on black asphalt at night, especially in a town without streetlamps or traffic lights, stranded in the middle of an off-city landscape built around a Walmart.

Luminosity is foreign on a Georgian January, but every commonality of daily life is being shredded in streaks of gold and red. They bark into the cloudy sky and flicker with the wind. Black shadows the strands of the sky in unbreathable plumes as if it were asphalt in daylight.

Daryl could see his shadow right now if only he could remove his eyes from the show of the sky, the macabre of the roughness he breathes and the tragedy of a cigarette on the bedroom floor. Other children view the scene in awe, finding marvel in tragedy until they are forced away by fire fighters. Eyes big and wide like Alex DeLarge accompany the gasps of an audience that he stands apart from as he watches the ever-consummating flames demolish his home in an inferno of poetic justice. Hell’s flames are finally free.

Inside the burning structure lay a woman on fire, who shut her eyes by mistake not knowing that she’d finally free herself from addiction in allowing it to cremate a life that had been built around her. Her son stands outside, only seven years old, and watches her die through a curtain of destructive light.

Another element adds to Vishnu’s conquest of the modular home, transparency through white and the yells of red-coated men. Sirens scream and flames crackle. His mouth tastes like the charcoal of meat left too long on the grill. There are so many lights that the asphalt loses its obscure quality in exchange for flashes of color.

Men begin to beat down his front door in similar thuds to a loud beating in his chest; everything that a child retains in beats to the back feels like it will spill right out of his ribcage. A firefighter hides him from the visage of finality, with a grip on the shoulder and a shaking of tunnel vision, with sweat-drenched brow and dips of tone in skin. He wears a razor burn on his jaw. Yells flee like the flames:

“Ain’t nothing to see here! Scram! Go home!”

How could he say that he’s already there?

The car shakes as it meets another bump in the asphalt, racing with a dire sort of urgency echoed in the rode work by the workers that had once counted the moments to 5 o’clock on a Friday. By now, trees have replaced wheat outside the car window. Daryl leans against the passenger door, elbow perched on the frame, looking not so much pensive as blank-faced. There is no music playing aside from the cranks of the wheel, the thuds on the asphalt, and a body crashing against the backseat with every bounce that a mid-2000s sedan could make.

Across the armrest, Rick is making his best efforts to withhold from crying. The sky has turned grey, clouded with an unexpected precipitation on the horizon, and the overall mood in the automobile is as bleak as the flyleaf of a half-written book. The ex-sheriff navigates slowly, solemnly, contemplatively–being that he has a corpse to explain. He breaks his gaze from the stretch of road before him to rub his palm into his right eye, before heavily returning his hand to the wheel and falling into a folly of frustration.

Jesus’ body, light from malnutrition in his dying hours, rattles around the plush interior as if he were trying to stir conversation in his absence. Rick had been wanting to ask Daryl why he’d been so distant as they removed the walker from the crucifix, carrying it with a disgust unseen in the man who’d thrived on years of roadkill, but his unspoken refusal to sit with the body had communicated an unwillingness of expression that had caused the ex-sheriff to shun the prospect of conversation. So now the dead man talks the most even though he is wordless.

In that moment, it becomes quite apparent to Daryl just how much he’s going to miss Jesus’ voice.

Despite conformity to the certain new world order, it had been a weird quirk of the bearded man to maintain a calendar to the best of his abilities. The exactness wasn’t nearly as valued of the vagueness that the month, which had once directed an ambiance of culture, held over him. Jesus was born in November, he had once told Daryl, who was born at the tail-end of June.

Back in what was approximated to be January, they’d sat out in the same sedan on the way back from Alexandria following a six day run. While it wasn’t particularly frigid, snow lightly lined the roads and clouded the window, accompanied by the squeaks of the windshield wiper as it facilitated a view into the serene environment. Evenings such as that one were so tranquil in nature that even dead men inhabiting the global setting seemed to be a distant, long-forgotten nightmare. Nicotine had cranked the window open, face bit by the chilly winds as they gusted inward. Jesus sat beside him at the wheel, smile lazily plastered on his face in such a way that felt inattentive yet inwardly present.

The biker let out a long drag, savoring the way that the smoke lingered in the air before falling behind the car, then turned to his companion and returned the grin to the best of his stoic ability.

“Daryl?”

“Mmm?” He scattered some ash outside by tapping his addiction on the edge of the glass.

Jesus chuckled, pausing introspectively before proceeding, “I know that you don’t really consider cooking to be your forte or anything…”

A snort interrupted him. Daryl slid the cigarette back against his lip, raising his hands, “If yer gonna ask me to make you some fancy-ass dinner when we get back, it ain’t happenin’.”

“No, no, no. Hear me out.” The diplomat revealed himself in those words. His placating tone always seemed to amuse Daryl, more so in the context of the situation.

“I’m tryin’ but then you pull out words like ‘forte’ and I don’t know if I’m hearin’ in tongues or somethin’,” he teased.

“Back to the point,” Jesus chortled, making eye contact and giving a nod, “I’m almost sure that you could make a killer rack of ribs. Not like that fancy steakhouse stuff or whatever, but the real deal.”

Daryl, having reached nearly a nub of remaining cigarette, flung it out the passenger window before cranking it up once more. Following this moment of deliberation, he then crossed his arms and gave a serious look to the other man,

“Nah.”

A mock tantrum ensued, with Jesus slapping his pant leg and shifting between statures of shock. “Aw, c’mon,” he hissed sardonically, “don’t be modest. This is serious.”

“Ahm bein’ serious. And yer a terrible driver.”

The car halted in less than an instant with enough force to make the pair jump against their seats. Removing his hands from the wheel, Jesus proceeded with the begging, now able to throw his palms together as if in prayer:

“Daryl! Please.”

The hunter recovered from his bewilderment of the ending motion to the automobile, edging fractionally closer to his finicky counterpart over the center console, before releasing a defeated sigh paired with a melodramatic eye roll. Every desire had to be in juxtaposition- the desire for summertime in the dead of winter, modesty in arrogance. Humor between them, produced mostly by the younger of the duo, was an undermined facet of their relationship in the eyes of the community.

He said, “It don’t seem like I’d be able to hunt no Porky Piggies anytime soon. But if you can hook me up with one of ‘em pigs over at Hilltop, I’ll make you a rack.”

Jesus nodded, understanding. Joy fell upon his light features and mischief leaped from his throat. “I doubt they’d understand the severity of the situation. We could always steal one, though,” he jested.

Another “nah” followed.

“Again, hear me out. This could be the biggest pig heist in history if we played our cards right!”

Daryl scoffed, “’Pig heist’ my ass.”

“I didn’t know that I could do that but if you show me how, I’d be happy to try.”

It was by far his least funny jab at innuendo.

The reception for it was enough to prove that the joke had fallen flat, with the hunter shaking his head disdainfully and reaching for another cigarette. Jesus perceived an unspoken nervousness in the other man, as he often did in tranquil scenes such as this one. It was clear that he was aware of Daryl’s reliance on the undead in order to feel needed by his community and this was a topic often discussed between them.

Defeated, he confessed the weakness of his plan, “I doubt it would work, anyways. I wouldn’t even know what to do to the pig while waiting for you to sneak over.”

“Yer slippery, but you ain’t got shit on a greasy lil’ pig,” Daryl joked, “’d be best if ya just killed the damn thing before playin’ around with it.’

“I was vegan before the outbreak, you know. It’s easier for me to kill other people than a pig. But I still wouldn’t take from Hilltop, especially with the way resources are.”

He continues, “It’s ironic, actually. Before the new world, I was totally fine with taking from others. I mean, I kept the ID from every wallet that I stole- which was dumb in retrospect because that’s evidence against me, but it didn’t really matter who the person was or their eye color and height. All I really cared about was that I had some cash to dump on weed. It felt good, too, because I thought that I was fighting the system. That year was a personal low, honestly.

“I never got caught, though. Pretty lucky, I guess.”

“Mah brother,” Daryl said resolutely, “he pulled twice the ‘mount of shit you did with half the brain you got. Got caught a lot, spent most of his time locked away.”

“I’ve thought about it a lot, you know. I never heard about someone doing something bad with intentions of being bad. Even when I was a pick-pocket, it was more about smoking to forget a lot of things I didn’t wanna remember. I couldn’t afford therapy so I justified it like that.

“What I mean to say is that I was afraid. I bet that your brother felt that same kind'a fear with every felony. It’s just human nature. Fear will always control us. It’s the emotional solution to Satan.”

It is with that sentiment that his offhanded monologue concluded and the car slips back into motion. After a few quiet moments, with eyes on the road that loomed before them, Jesus synopsized his internal turmoil in a new belief:

“Being scared… it doesn’t make you a bad person.”

Rick is scared right now. Scenarios of upheaval and confusion in the Hilltop unfurl in the curls of his brain cells.

The ex-sheriff wishes they could discuss this before their impending arrival, but seeing as the morale of them both is so utterly low, a conversation would be irrevocably unbearable. Ideally Daryl, whose demeanor is suddenly faltering through an uncanny sort of stoicism, will follow his lead when presenting their witness accounts to the people of Hilltop. But when the biker fell into moods such as this one, when emotion bested him even through a lacking self-awareness, it becomes quite unpredictable to foresee what he’ll do.

In the distance, the tall fence and vast field surrounding the colony begin to present themselves. It is his final opportunity to invoke Daryl to his purpose and truthful alibi, but seeing the archer’s philosophical emptiness through small and sad lagoons of blue, he decides not to. Readjusting his grip on the wheel, Rick maintains a forward gaze.

They pull up through the muck, speared assassins trained on the sedan. Rick has to get out of the car to announce their arrival, but shortly thereafter the gate opens and they enter the vicarious refugee camp.

Modern Hilltop is different than the initial, impoverish locale the Alexandrians had encountered that fateful day they were introduced to the idea that the world wasn’t quite as small as they had been led to believe. Woodshops that were once shacks have been rebuilt into proper-looking structures of neat brick, greenhouses lined the edge of the growing community in verdant-and-glass glory, the trailers that serve as homes had been given a makeover as well following the fall of Negan- painted in murals by some of the children and few surviving art-enthusiasts, and even the general mood of the community seems a bit brighter.

Destruction had served them well.

Residents gladly pause their activities to investigate the automobile, all bearing a certain cheerful disposition. Naturally, a small crowd begins to develop in anticipation of Rick’s arrival. The car shifts into drive and he gives a sharp inhale, looking to Daryl once more before popping the driver door open.

Before a cacophony of greetings can jingle against him, Rick solemnly speaks:

“I need ta’ speak to Maggie.”

This is enough to stir the onlookers a bit and attract a few more, but someone from among them nods accordingly and briskly turns to find the leader. She’s another change in the community: Gregory had been pushed out by his people and replaced with Maggie, who could be credited to the thriving state of the community. While Gregory had struggled against the discorded environment given to him, Maggie’s best side showed in turmoil’s hours– especially with the fever of widowhood at Lucille’s spikes.

A young guard named Eduardo climbs down from his post and clasps Rick on the shoulder, greeting him with uncomfortable and unrequited familiarity. “Rick, my man, good to see you!”

Rick, feeling a bit shaken and a bit desperate, unintentionally forces the young guard off. While the ex-sheriff’s mood shifts between confidence and confusion, he wears the same look of exasperation he’d expressed countless other times, wary of how the peers of the dead man in his backseat would react upon the news, but manages to clear his throat and regain some sort of semblance of presence.

Murmurs travel across the group, among them a few unfamiliar faces. Doctor Harlan stands by several feral-looking adults, clearly given them an introductory tour leading up to the scene that now stands center to all other happenings. Women in earthy tones with hardened faces, sun-kissed men with wrapped hands from metalworking, and a smorgasbord of other characters frame the drama surrounding the automobile.

“Good to see you, too,” he manages to croak out just as the passenger door is forcefully shut, announcing the arrival of Daryl Dixon.

The archer looks absolutely wild as he straightens from the car; his dirty hair falls in unnatural locks, empty gaze seeming to allude to an unspoken fury; muscles tense and lips pressed, in the mood of a captive animal, and eyes focused on the bleak sparseness of the dirt ground. His chest heaves with much effort and a disdain radiates from his stature, even leading those who envy him to be a bit cautious of his state.

Daryl looks over the crowd through his hair, grunting, before he opens the backdoor and dragging the corpse out by its legs. The door is restored to a shut state and the hunter hauls the body up, tucking his forearms into its armpits so that the limp head rests against his stomach. He does this deliberately in order to remove the guilt from Rick, fully aware that the image of him holding the body will be the memory imprinted in these individuals rather than a sugarcoated sob story about a man on a cross in the middle of a field.

He longs for their blame.

A gasp falls out of each audience member’s mouth, tears building in some sets of eyes and nausea rising in the throats of others. Daryl stands without a shift in his stoicism, gaze meeting that of a small Hispanic child as she gets forced back by an adult. Questions and exclamations fill the air as Rick searches for a calmness to steady them with.

“Where did you find him?”

“What happened?”

“Oh god!”

“Kal was with him! Where’s Kal?”

“Please, let’s just wait for Maggie to get here,” Rick pleas.

When she finally does arrive, her reaction blurs amongst the rest with hands jumping to cover her gaping mouth. She rushes forward, immediately slipping into the same interrogative behavior as her people.

A cumulative of her questioning could be concise in “What happened?”

“We found ‘im out in a field,” Rick states. He wants to pull her aside and discuss this in private, but that conversation will have to be held later on as they currently stand before an audience. “Ah’ think that it’d be best to play it careful for the next few days. Whoever did this is still out there.”

More questions arose as to setting and the discovery of a second body, but there only comes vague replies from the ex-sheriff’s end. Much of his comforting fell upon the deaf ears of those closer to the hunter and the corpse, who shared a similar distance from the actual action of the moment.

“How’d you find him?” an audience member asks, a man in his late 30s who Rick recognizes as a doctor but has only encountered in limited interactions. The name Wes comes to mind.

“Up… up on a cross. Right now it’s looking like retaliation from some Saviors who still side with Negan,” Rick answered decisively, “There was an ‘A’ on it. When ah’ get back to Alexandria, I’ll get some more definitive answers from ‘im.”

That isn’t really enough to appease the tension of the crowd, but rather concern them further. Conflicts with an enemy they’d already faced reap the benefit of a familiar combative scene but it would also mean that they’d never truly won the war.

Stillness dissipates as some women distinguish themselves from the group, volunteering to bury him. What follows are a blur of testimonials in what a significant role the fallen man had played in developing the community to its current splendor. Everything they say sticks together in hymns of pleasantries, shrill and sad, but meaningless in terms of the end aside from the consensus that there will be a funeral for him.

Daryl slumps the corpse over his shoulder before proceeding to walk through the crowd, who open up for him like the Red Sea, and treks to the side of the museum to await further instruction. He feels some heads turn in his tracks but avoids looking back on them, as if it were truly Sodom that he is leaving in his wake. The body is light with a lack of life, but it burdens his shoulder more than anything else ever has.

Greyness further captivates the sky and precipitation looms on the horizon. The archer drops the dead man remorselessly, eyeing him with uneasy disposition.

Jesus’ lips are chewed as if he had bitten off them himself in bouts of hunger. Oh how many times they’d been plump with other sorts of bites to have been devoured by a post-mortem beast! Pupil-less clouds dance across the glass of heavy eyelids, lashes curled in an infinite stare. Every ounce of rage in his mechanized motions was eliminated by the bloody piece de resistance that had been born of a bullet’s kiss. Daryl is encompassed by an uncontrollable desire to peel every bit of flesh from the walker’s face and remove every bit of identity from it, with a nameless grave and nameless set of vandalized limbs. He wants the skin under his nails and gore to paint every bit of the leftover of his being. The final impression of a being that had left such a lasting impression on him would be a grey-skinned monstrosity on the ground in the moments before a rainstorm. The hunter can’t bring himself to rip that creature to shreds, in all its shades of disgust.

Maybe it’s because of the lingering beauty that not even death can eradicate that clings to every rural feature–from God’s masterfully designed cheekbones to a brow that could once accommodate every emotion, because even disgust couldn’t kill the longing in Daryl’s gut.

Lights start to blink and burn like an old photograph around him, clicking and blinding him from reality. It feels like standing after two days without food and Daryl grasps against his cranium in search for resolution.

The lips reappear to him, no longer chapped but now very much vicarious and pink. A grin as wide as he can see, pearly white teeth exposed, and irises full aware.

Jesus stands before him once more, on Daryl’s patio back in Alexandria. The biker can feel himself reciprocate the smile, even more so when his companion starts to speak in a reverend of joy:

“I can’t believe we’re actually doing this! God, Daryl, you’re the best!”

The sky is dark with limited luminosity granted by freckles of stars lining the blur of grey to navy. Cracks in white wood scatter across every imperfection of the unkempt locale and suddenly the archer finds himself uncomfortable with his disarray, but the fear is eradicated when he traces the vantage point down to his circular stack of brick and stone he’d constructed in the grasses of the yard, atop which lay an excerpt of a chain link fence. A bottle of expired tangy BBQ sauce stands perked neatly against the unlit fire pit, and when Daryl lifts his hand to investigate a weight that flits against it, he finds a bloody rack of pork ribs grasped tightly between his fingers and his palm.

It is enough to ground him into the moment.

He recalls the measures he went through to obtain this meat, in having to awkwardly ask Carol to work her magic and endure several turns of the nickname “Pookie.” Initially, the hunter had made attempts at slaughtering a pig by fate’s encounter, but a close call the week prior had urged him to expedite their festivities. So hours of nervous anticipation and a romantic sense of adrenaline had built a homegrown grill with a side of three-year-old sauce (which was also a gift from Carol) in the backyard. Present as well is a beaten trash lid formed for roundness. Daryl is suddenly appreciative of the mood, especially in Jesus’s delight.

“Yeah,” he remarks hoarsely, “this is how we did it back home.”

The younger man begins to feverishly rub his hands together in delight, eyes set on the makeshift grill with an anticipatory breath. Daryl withdraws a lighter from his back pocket and descents off the patio towards the brick-and-chain structure. Jesus follows eagerly, eyes trained on the muscular form guiding him.

Daryl gingerly hands the meat to his companion before pulling the wire aside to revealed sheathed newspaper within the structure. “Careful,” he warns shyly, selecting a piece of paper and setting it ablaze before proceeding to throw it in with the rest and returning the grates over the structure. Destruction in a control environment is the birth of creation.

And the fire crackles to this thought.

An aged voice interrupts his reminiscing, “We usually burn our dead, you know.”

The hunter turns to find a woman, one who had earlier attested to the fatality’s best attributes, standing before him between the brown of the Barrington house and the lush of surrounding shrubbery. She is similar in stature to Jacqui, with a friendly and moderately-witty disposition as well as a wary smile that breeds sympathy.

“Befo’ Negan, it was always a burial. The war got us used to burnin’ them, though. Can’t rememba’ the last time we held a funeral around here.”

Daryl feels as though he’s just swallowed a lit match. Discomfort consumes him but the pleasantry of behaving himself, especially in the presence of one who reminds him of the deceased, steadies the dirty of his boots among the other roots of the earth.

“It’s a sad day in Hilltop.”

With that, the biker scoffs and determinately marches off. She says something else but it fades into a mumble with each crunch of terrain, crunch of grinding teeth, crunch of thunder building in the atmosphere. The flames he swallows burn in his gut and churn among them, licking like gasoline into his lungs.

Then he’s back in Alexandria, sitting against the brick foundation of his house with Jesus. The scent of smoke lingers, thicker and sweeter than the common fallout of a cigarette. Spoiled barbeque sauce slaps the roof of his mouth with the chewing of dense pork, teeth against bone scraping in harmony.

“I think you can cook,” Jesus comments, full-mouthed.

A humble shrug retorts Daryl, focused on eating.

“Authentic Georgian barbeque…” the long-haired man reflects before changing the subject, “Did you ever leave Georgia before the outbreak?”

Normally this question would stir Daryl, but being that he’s feeling so benevolent, he simply answers “Nah.”

Jesus nods, before receiving a similar question from his companion.

“Did ya’ ever leave Virginia before all this shit started?”

“Oh–oh yeah. I’ve been around. In college, I studied abroad. I mean, I’ve travelled.”

This silences Daryl, who appears a bit embarrassed by his lack of world knowledge. To reinvigorate him, Jesus continues with a narrative on a particular travel experience immediately before the clocks hit zero.

“I was living in D.C. when the internet started some crazy talk about a killer virus. It kind of started like small talk–oh, have you heard the rumors? Even as speculation became bigger online with videos and legitimate sources, the news sheltered us from it. I’ve heard that other places had earlier media coverage than D.C., but talk of an evacuation really scared us more than anything.

It was a few weeks after the first whispers of something being terribly wrong that me and my boyfriend at-the-time got concerned. The news wasn’t looking bright and he was a pretty superstitious guy and all- so he really did believe everything was about to fall apart. He was also obsessed with this band, which I won’t deny was pretty good, and we had tickets to see it within the next few weeks. Well, me, being the spectacular guy that I am, I decided to surprise him with a trip to the Boston show instead. The concert there was like two weeks before ours, so I thought maybe we could squeeze it in before anything bad could really happen.

“It took us around four days to get there, because of roadblocks and traffic restrictions. My ex used to have this app on his phone that could show you which backroads are the best to take at rush hour and stuff, but it fit the mission perfectly. So we drove and slept in a few pretty interesting motels along the way, but when we got just outside the city, cops made us turn back. Actually, it wasn’t really cops, it was the military. They had those cool bags of sand blocking the highway and guns, and people, you know, really started to panic. We were lucky, though; we just turned around and went back. There really wasn’t any use in fighting with the law, especially considering the opportunity they’d have with a drug bust in our backseat.

“So we turned around and I felt pretty down, my boyfriend was crying–we had put a ridiculous amount of effort into getting there just to be forced out. I tried to exaggerate some sort of stupid scenario to him where we sneak into the city somehow but, I mean, if we were kicked out then it didn’t seem likely the band would be able to get in.

“And they weren’t, it turns out. I checked my phone and the entire tour had been cancelled. We drove through six states for no reason at all. I mean, that’s just luck somedays. I’ve been pretty lucky, I know, but aside from the end of the world, that was the unluckiest thing that’s ever happened to me.”

Nicotine, nicotine, nicotine.

The craving for a cigarette comes to his jittering fingertips as he trenches through the vibrant by somber community, the ambiance’s anticipated rainfall weighing on him as he looks through rows of colorful mobile homes. Balloons once lining each post violently sway in the wind emulating his inner turmoil as he approaches the sunflower mural lining a haven of inhabitation, a symbolization of conventional comfort intermingled with transcendent sensationalism.

Thick chartreuse stems guide to anatomically correct flowers- a volunteered surface for the environmental education program that informs the local children on the future of agriculture. An offer to reside in the Barrington house had resulted in the shared trailer that Daryl now approaches, with a rickety creak of the metal door opening and closing. Overpopulation had been resolved in the use of scavenged wooden screens and dramatically folded sheets, dividing spaces. There is neatness, for sure, but also disarray in comparison to life before the end.

It’s a friendly reminder that nothing will ever truly revert to how it was.

Jesus’s space is designated by three different colored screens and an ironic bead-curtain entry. Minimalism surmises his perspective on home-décor rather accurately, with only a plainly dressed bed, a foldable chair, and a clothing rack being the principal features of the room. The fashions of the clothing rack include a sparse selection of outfits–a few practical shirts and maybe two pairs of pants. Underneath the frame of the makeshift closet are three map-printed boxes full of miscellaneous trinkets, gifts, and practical items. The majority of his weapons were hidden away under the bed, concealed by removable storage blocks. Draped across the seat rests the infamously mucky trench coat and on the wall beneath the window, right against the head of the bed, is one of those flipping calendars that accommodate month and day rotations. The final date logged was “April 18th.”

Daryl crouches to admire the rows of classic literature that are shelved beneath the mattress, each of the three rows ending with the metal wheels that once served as supports but now dangle a bit as the storage compartments usurp that role. He flips through well-known titles: To Kill a Mockingbird, Lolita, Moby Dick, A Portrait of Dorian Gray–as well as some more obscure titles: Anthem, The Wanting Seed. The little library in a post-apocalyptic bedroom was Jesus’ salvation, that is, aside from Daryl.

The pattering of rain commences on the metallic roof, reflected in the dotted shadows that scatter across the room between shadowed cracks in through the blinds. It’s drowsy, like the archer.

He kicks off his boots and slightly saunters over onto the bed, plopping down and listening to the downcast, watching the dots in the window paint a canvas across the trailer’s interior. Fatigue overtakes him and soon he drifts off to sleep, but only after reminiscing on the day’s revelations.

Men like Daryl don’t usually dream. Dixons are realists; it was their communal burden to carry every severity with them as if it were an indisputable and unavoidable occurrence. Moreover in a constantly-climactic environment such as presented by the apocalypse, sleep is feigned so lightly that REM can’t seem to find an opportunity to present itself.

In Jesus’ death, an immediate weight had been placed on Daryl. But now as he drifts off to sleep, there’s a lightness unlike anything he’d felt in the years since he’d crawled from his mother’s womb. All this time, he’d been preoccupied in surviving so that he may live to serve those in his familiar structure, but now the worst death that could transpire in singularity had occurred and nothing had come from it other than worsened neutrality. He’d failed to protect so many people and now it dawns on him that there is no longer a justification in his existence.

Nihilism clears him of his burdens. Daryl realizes that his fate no longer matters to him.

And then, in closing his eyes, a memory consumes his dreamy thoughts.

They’re on a hunt right now, but by this point in the many months of interaction staggering between them, it’s a pleasant enough mood. His shotgun rests draped over his shoulder as they trek through the lush wilderness of Northern Virginia. Right now, Jesus is droning on about some story that happened to him in college. Daryl scoffs at every other precocious word, (what do you ever do with an art history degree?,) yet the other man persists in his narrative. Freckles phrases fling themselves into his subconscious, among these: “It was immoral, I know,” “There really wasn’t a lot of value in a vase covered in goats,” and “I left before the police got there.” Regardless of his disinterest, the actual act of listening to his peer is cheerful enough.

Daryl pauses the hike to investigate some tracks scattered across the forested ground, silencing the talkative other with the raise of his index. The size, imprint, and spacing of the tracks lead him to believe that the prey they stalk is a rabbit, which would be a sizable kill alongside the two squirrel corpses dangling from his belt. While he recognizes that he won’t bring in anything notable judging by the day’s luck, he decides that he will pursue the rodent.

“Hey,” his grunt is directed at Jesus, who immediately responds in his presence. “A rabbit,” he informs him, with a finger signaling to the markings in the muck and broken twigs. Jesus nods carefully, face knit in solemnity. They begin a cautious trek following the ground’s evidence of a mammalian life.

Normally this time would be consummated with extended narratives pertaining to life before the outbreak, entirely shared by the long-haired man, but after several hunting trips such as this one, he’d come to understand that breaking Daryl’s concentration wouldn’t particularly strengthen their comradery. Part of this serves to comfort the biker, in knowing his conditioning had made an impact on the other, but there’s a certain degree of sadness in him whenever Jesus feels pressed for silence. Daryl enjoys the white noise of a personal story when it comes from Jesus. There’s something therapeutic about the efforts he makes in building a connection.

It makes Daryl very happy.

After a few minutes of stalking the rabbit tracks, Jesus loses interest. He breaks the air with a shift in posture and a turn of the head, halting as Daryl runs his visage over scattered clues that linger before him.

“Daryl!” The younger man calls in a hushed exclamation.

Tracks lose their relevance in the alarming tone of his companion.

“What?”

“I think I just saw a deer over there,” thumb waving westbound, “I’m gonna go follow it.”

The hunter dismissively waves his hand before returning to his observations, “Do whatever.”

Following the separation, it takes several minutes for the rabbit to be found. This time-lapse is only worsened by Daryl’s dreamscape, which exaggerates it to several hours of crooked trees and circular paths.

Unfortunately, the creature is a feast to a legless walker on the forest ground, only recognizable by its translucent white fur amid a rotten and bloody face. When Daryl approaches, the appetizer becomes overshadowed by a larger and more preferable entrée, causing bony arms to outstretch in a pleading grasp. He quickly resolves in stabbing the undead monstrosity and gives it a thorough twice-over before throwing what little remains of the rabbit against the earth in defeat.

He turns back, memory and fantasy distorted, to find an array of a million different footprints leading in the same direction. The peculiarities of a dream present themselves as such but such an apathetic figure doesn’t give himself room for enough self-analysis to find every bit of antireality.

A clearing appears eventually between a cinematic and perfectly planted circle of trees. The meadow isn’t exceptionally large–generously to say that it’s approximately the size of an average swimming pool. Leaves feel brighter here because there isn’t so much a forest canopy and thus sunlight radiates the entirety of the small space, so idyllic that Eden’s gardens ought to be envious. Within its arboreal walls only grow a single color: yellow.

Marigolds dot the grass like the freckles of the neighborhood kids who watched his own house burn down in awe.

Marigolds dot the grass like weeds.

Like pestilence. Like infection.

Like that inexorable rush of joy that swells in Daryl’s chest when he finds his companion on the other end of the meadow, turned away and crouched over.

He awkwardly clears his throat, a bit overwhelmed by the serenity.

“I already knew you were there.”

Jesus rises, brushing his thighs, as Daryl approaches from across the field, not careful of the flowers in his path. There is a lingering suspicion that a deer had never presented itself along the way but rather that he’d been guided to this locale intentionally, but nothing prepared the older man for what he sees in the corporal rotation of the other.

With outstretched arms for dramatic effect, Jesus fashions a look of marigolds in his beard. The wrinkles around his and his grin complete the immaturity of the action as he moves towards Daryl, who can’t help but snort in reaction.

“Now yer a pansy inside n’ out, eh?”

“What? You don’t like?”

They meet, face to face, a bit off center.

“If that’s the look yer goin’ for.”

Jesus raises an eyebrow in his signature cocky smirk, “I think you like it.”

“Nah. Yer right, I do. Very…” Daryl searches for a word, “floral.”

“Yeah?”

Daryl’s breath catches in his throat, unsure of what his peer is getting at.

“Mhm,” is the reply he deems most suitable.

“Nice observation,” Jesus nods jokingly.

By this point, the two of them are standing eye-to-eye, the shorter man looking up with the most minimal effort. Daryl’s left hand is perched on the gun strap slung over his shoulder, heart pounding like a siren, trying to sway him away from the closeness between them. He looks bewildered and simultaneously struggles to seem unafraid in a subtle assertion of dominance.

The archer doesn’t want to let him win, regardless of his uncertainty as to which game it is that they’re playing.

“Daryl?” He is broken from his reverie but unable to respond.

It is now, in the softness of his voice, that Daryl understands there is no ‘winning.’ It’s just delaying through mutual losses.

He grips Jesus’s forearm with little force, pulling their faces a bit closer together. In his hesitance and a quick turn of the head, a kiss presses into the hunter’s cheek.

It feels like the petals of a Cherokee rose. But other sensations are the prickle of a beard against his jaw and marigolds comforting his nerves in their wake. This is not his first kiss, but the sensation of buzzing in his skin is new.

And then the contact is broken.

Suddenly, Daryl is overwhelmed by the desire to push this further. He recognizes that Jesus was testing the waters with that peck and he knows that he passed based on the longing in his chest.

A fleeting remembrance of the month comes to him in this moment.

That’s his final thought before he cups the floral enthralled jaw of his counterpart and presses their lips together in soft haste. It tastes like every joy of the seasons- the sweetness of Spring, the exhilaration of Summer, the comfort of Autumn, and the peace of Winter. How had Daryl been to know just how soft those rosy lips flourish under that trimmed bear? How was he supposed to know just how blissful it would be to smell the adrenaline on the other man’s skin?

Kissing Jesus is like hitting your head on a pillow. It’s a gentle crash.

Hands crawl up to grip themselves on Daryl’s shoulder and hip, only bringing them closer. The hunter tastes like oak and the prophet tastes like cherries. It’s June.

He wakes up as though from a nightmare: bleary eyed and shaken. It takes the paneling of the trailer’s ceiling to remind Daryl of where he is, but that is not enough to erase a lingering presence of yellow and cherry from the remnants of his dream.

Exasperated, he turns over in efforts to regain unconsciousness.

Unfortunately, Daryl finds another’s eyelids and serene mask in doing so. Beside him lay Jesus, tranquil and asleep but with the freshness of death peeking through every vein. Rhythmic breathing matching the childlike appearance of two hands neatly tucked against his cheek, sleeping but dead, in a bed but not a coffin.

A blink destroys the sleeper and leaves Daryl, who is now very awake, to the reality of solitude.

In an effort to calm his racing thoughts, the archer turns the other way but, rather than collapsing onto the coiled mattress, he finds a heartbeat against him. The pounding of his burdened mind falls into a melody against it, cut short with intervals of soft breaths. Light has shifted from a neutral blue to a fluorescent bulb’s sunshine and home has been redirected to Daryl’s Alexandria bedroom.

He’s lying across Jesus’s bare chest, breathing in every bit of hormone that accompanies any post-coital setting, tangled in duvet-less sheets. Above him plays a concerto in the soothing syllables of a reading voice, sharing from a book words written by another. Jesus, upon learning that Daryl had dropped out of school, had taken it upon himself to share the best of classic literature with his lover. At first, there’d been a bit of lacking cooperation, but over time the nightly readings became a ritual only held between the two of them.

“Montag looked at these men whose faces were sunburnt by a thousand real and ten thousand imaginary fires, whose work flushed their cheeks and fevered their eyes,” he reads.

Daryl watches intently, the way that Jesus’s lashes are lowered in looking over the page, the way his tongue rolls against his teeth when he talks, every small flare of his nostrils with breaking the closure of his lips. Every pore is perfection.

The waves rolling across his chest with every motion of inhale and exhale soothe Daryl, more so than any drug he’d taken by Merle’s recommendation. Infatuation to him is an addictive sort of joy, one that he likes to dance around for fear of a reliance on it. But right here, on this bed, there is no need for control.

“They and their charcoal hair and soot-coloured brows and bluish-ash-smeared cheeks where they had shaven close; but their heritage showed. Montag started up, his mouth opened. Had he ever seen a fireman that didn’t have black hair, black brows, a fiery face, and a blue-steel shaved but unshaved look?”

“Paul?”

The reading stops and the cerulean irises focus on Daryl.

“Yeah?”

“How many times ya’ read this book?” It’s an unexpected question for sure, but one that nagged at the biker every time he’d hear Jesus masterfully flow over each and every word as if he were sharpening a knife rather than carving a spear.

“I think this is the sixth time,” he confesses.

“Why?”

It takes a moment of consideration to receive an answer.

“It’s good to relive some things. Retrospection leads to growth.”

In intervals, the warmth and imagery moves. It becomes a concerto of a loud steady rhythm like the bass of a drum being tapped on a constant. There’s a dull thud of skin hitting skin, a sensation of legs wrapped around his waist. At other times it’s the instances between a blink of thick, dark lashes. It’s like a ball hitting the pavement or the flash of sirens in front a burning house. The heartbeats in his chest, racing with rage.

It becomes moans into each other’s mouths, hot breath inhaling and exhaling. Words flipping from his lips with every line of Fahrenheit 451. It takes four hundred and fifty one degrees to burn a book.

Four hundred and fifty.

One.

The pounding is so heavy, blurs of pleasure in the bed and shaking in the street. A man who lays draped across a crucifix, in flesh and in gold, but similarly his head against a chest with calmness of literature spewed at him.

Fahrenheit.

Firefighters push him back, shaking him, yelling at him. “Go home! Go home! Go home!” More moans behind closed doors. Paul’s laugh.

Flashing lights, frames from select moments of his life burning and burning in his childhood home and in his lover’s bed. Breathless kisses, moans, clapping of skin meeting skin. A weight against his stomach, an arousal of another. Flames. Blood. Glory in the sheets, gore on the cross.

A book.

It takes 451 degrees Fahrenheit to burn a book.

And Daryl, sitting up on the edge of the mattress with a look beyond God’s plain, knows exactly what he will do.

In the early morning hours before sunrise, when the sky is yet introduced to the embrace of the universe’s center and lingers on the coldness that night presents, Daryl finds himself standing outside of Hilltop’s vast walls. A steady breeze bleeds against his cheeks, chilling the archer’s stony pout.

Before him lie a stack of books hastily thrown together; some paperback and others hard-covered, pages that are ripped flatted down by the weight of wetness. Bindings are torn, literature cut open like a bleeding wound, disarray and chaos breaching every finely typed line of words once so deeply-contemplated by their masters. 104 mostly classic works all finely doused in gasoline.

One hundred and four.

It takes four hundred and fifty one degrees to burn a book.

Wet hands on a crimson-colored rag and a noncommittal shove into the denim back pocket, hollow expression trained on a bonfire for one. Daryl clicks open his sterling lighter a final time before throwing it to books.

At times like this, one would want gusto. Like the pleasure of an eruption into gold and red and glory. But with books, the burning is slow. Maybe they’re reaching 451 degrees Fahrenheit, but it takes a good few seconds for every inch of their form to be consumed in flames.

Arsonist upon arsonist out to remember the date, unbeknownst to even the most tedious itinerary keepers that never ended a clock even when the world hit zero, that Daryl Dixon fell of the deep end. Because, like a resurrection, his peripherals and dissociative nature like an eye in the sky caught sight of a figure beside him and the burning books, shrouded in trench and wool.

Desperation drives us out. Or maybe it’s the heat of the fire against the exasperated trauma of a broken man’s brain. Looming on the horizon is more than sunrise.

Hell’s pity is enough to defy that–another page up in smokes. Fahrenheit has hit past 451 by now because even Daryl can feel himself amid the inferno locking lashes with Dante and Virgil. And the ghost that looks forward with him, in every bit of silenced grief, validates that this has been the straw that broke the camel’s back, because right now Daryl knows that Paul is standing beside him.

His peripherals catch the profile’s front gaze, steady in concentration, with pursed lips and tired eyes as if to condone the eradication of his last material bond.

But none of that matters, because he’s back even if it’s just a fleeting visual hallucination. That alone is enough to appease the mourner. Daryl presses the back of his hand against that of the animus and it swings for a moment, in a motion made countless times before.

They clasp hands and play audience to the show that no book could sell you.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> YIKES dis da start of a downward spiral for Dat Boi Dixon… aw mane, first zombies and now ghost-like apparitions? Also, I read Fahrenheit 451 like four years ago so I just winged it with the general points that I remember. The theme for this chapter was ‘anger’ but it was also that sort of fizzling between the initial denial and the actual anger. Idk. But anyways, chapter 3’ll be up next Thursday (hopefully). Have a nice week!


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